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Friday, February 28, 2014

Leftists Become Incandescent When Reminded of the Socialist Roots of Nazism

By Daniel Hannan

You can't accuse the NSDAP of downplaying the "Socialist" bit

On 16 June 1941, as Hitler readied his forces for Operation
Barbarossa, Josef Goebbels looked forward to the new order that the
Nazis would impose on a conquered Russia. There would be no come-back,
he wrote, for capitalists nor priests nor Tsars. Rather, in the place of
debased, Jewish Bolshevism, the Wehrmacht would deliver “der echte
Sozialismus”: real socialism.

Goebbels never doubted that he was a socialist. He understood Nazism
to be a better and more plausible form of socialism than that propagated
by Lenin. Instead of spreading itself across different nations, it
would operate within the unit of the Volk.

So total is the cultural victory of the modern Left that the merely
to recount this fact is jarring. But few at the time would have found it
especially contentious. As George Watson put it in The Lost Literature of Socialism:

It is now clear beyond all reasonable doubt that
Hitler and his associates believed they were socialists, and that
others, including democratic socialists, thought so too.

The clue is in the name. Subsequent generations of Leftists have
tried to explain away the awkward nomenclature of the National Socialist
German Workers’ Party as either a cynical PR stunt or an embarrassing
coincidence. In fact, the name meant what it said.

Hitler told Hermann Rauschning, a Prussian who briefly worked for the
Nazis before rejecting them and fleeing the country, that he had
admired much of the thinking of the revolutionaries he had known as a
young man; but he felt that they had been talkers, not doers. “I have
put into practice what these peddlers and pen pushers have timidly
begun,” he boasted, adding that “the whole of National Socialism” was
“based on Marx”.

Marx’s error, Hitler believed, had been to foster class war instead
of national unity – to set workers against industrialists instead of
conscripting both groups into a corporatist order. His aim, he told his
economic adviser, Otto Wagener, was to “convert the German Volk to
socialism without simply killing off the old individualists” – by which
he meant the bankers and factory owners who could, he thought, serve
socialism better by generating revenue for the state. “What Marxism,
Leninism and Stalinism failed to accomplish,” he told Wagener, “we shall
be in a position to achieve.”

Leftist readers may by now be seething. Whenever I touch on this subject,
it elicits an almost berserk reaction from people who think of
themselves as progressives and see anti-fascism as part of their
ideology. Well, chaps, maybe now you know how we conservatives feel when
you loosely associate Nazism with “the Right”.

To be absolutely clear, I don’t believe that modern Leftists have
subliminal Nazi leanings, or that their loathing of Hitler is in any way
feigned. That’s not my argument. What I want to do, by holding up the
mirror, is to take on the equally false idea that there is an
ideological continuum between free-marketers and fascists.

The idea that Nazism is a more extreme form of conservatism has
insinuated its way into popular culture. You hear it, not only when
spotty students yell “fascist” at Tories, but when pundits talk of
revolutionary anti-capitalist parties, such as the BNP and Golden Dawn,
as “far Right”.

What is it based on, this connection? Little beyond a jejune sense
that Left-wing means compassionate and Right-wing means nasty and
fascists are nasty. When written down like that, the notion sounds
idiotic, but think of the groups around the world that the BBC, for
example, calls “Right-wing”: the Taliban, who want communal ownership of
goods; the Iranian revolutionaries, who abolished the monarchy, seized
industries and destroyed the middle class; Vladimir Zhirinovsky, who
pined for Stalinism. The “Nazis-were-far-Right” shtick is a symptom of
the wider notion that “Right-wing” is a synonym for “baddie”.

One of my constituents once complained to the Beeb about a report on
the repression of Mexico's indigenous peoples, in which the government
was labelled Right-wing. The governing party, he pointed out, was a
member of the Socialist International and, again, the give-away was in
its name: Institutional Revolutionary Party. The BBC’s response was
priceless. Yes, it accepted that the party was socialist, “but what our
correspondent was trying to get across was that it is authoritarian”.

In fact, authoritarianism was the common feature of socialists of
both National and Leninist varieties, who rushed to stick each other in
prison camps or before firing squads. Each faction loathed the other as
heretical, but both scorned free-market individualists as beyond
redemption. Their battle was all the fiercer, as Hayek pointed out in
1944, because it was a battle between brothers.

Authoritarianism – or, to give it a less loaded name, the belief that
state compulsion is justified in pursuit of a higher goal, such as
scientific progress or greater equality – was traditionally a
characteristic of the social democrats as much as of the
revolutionaries.

Jonah Goldberg has chronicled the phenomenon at length in his magnum opus, Liberal Fascism.
Lots of people take offence at his title, evidently without reading the
book since, in the first few pages, Jonah reveals that the phrase is
not his own. He is quoting that impeccable progressive H.G. Wells who,
in 1932, told the Young Liberals that they must become “liberal
fascists” and “enlightened Nazis”.

In those days, most prominent Leftists intellectuals, including
Wells, Jack London, Havelock Ellis and the Webbs, tended to favour
eugenics, convinced that only religious hang-ups were holding back the
development of a healthier species. The unapologetic way in which they
spelt out the consequences have, like Hitler’s actual words, been
largely edited from our discourse. Here, for example, is George Bernard
Shaw in 1933:

Extermination must be put on a scientific basis if it
is ever to be carried out humanely and apologetically as well as
thoroughly… If we desire a certain type of civilisation and culture we
must exterminate the sort of people who do not fit into it.

Eugenics, of course, topples easily into racism. Engels himself wrote
of the “racial trash” – the groups who would necessarily be supplanted
as scientific socialism came into its own. Season this outlook with a
sprinkling of anti-capitalism and you often got Leftist anti-Semitism –
something else we have edited from our memory, but which once went
without saying. “How, as a socialist, can you not be an anti-Semite?”
Hitler had asked his party members in 1920.

Are contemporary Leftist critics of Israel secretly anti-Semitic? No,
not in the vast majority of cases. Are modern socialists inwardly
yearning to put global warming sceptics in prison camps? Nope. Do
Keynesians want the whole apparatus of corporatism, expressed by
Mussolini as “everything in the state, nothing outside the state”?
Again, no. There are idiots who discredit every cause, of course, but
most people on the Left are sincere in their stated commitment to human
rights, personal dignity and pluralism.

My beef with many (not all) Leftists is a simpler one. By refusing to
return the compliment, by assuming a moral superiority, they make
political dialogue almost impossible. Using the soubriquet “Right-wing”
to mean “something undesirable” is a small but important example.

Next time you hear Leftists use the word fascist as a general insult,
gently point out the difference between what they like to imagine the
NSDAP stood for and what it actually proclaimed.

The Dutch Nazi Party was equally explicit: "With Germany Against Capitalism"

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